Notes from FooCamp:
Saturday, I sat in on a session in corporate blogging. What is good blogging for, and what is blogging good for? What happens when bad blogging happens? How does one establish policies for organizations?
And what does it take to make bloggging work?
(The answer is "search", but you should follow below the fold...)
The session gave a lot of thought to internal blogs and what they can be used for. Google has a thriving culture of internal blogs. In contrast, people from Microsoft, SUN, and Yahoo each reported that while their external blogs are working fine (blogs.sun.net; scoble and the microsoft bloggers), the internal ones tended to fall apart.
The crucial difference, as far as I can tell, is that Google has really good intranet search: that is, you can put something on an intranet blog and it won't get lost. When a Googler puts something on an intranet blog, other Google employees can find it with a quick search. This is very different from many other intranets, which are fairly hard to search.
If you joined this blog yesterday, you probably haven't read back more than a dozen posts or so -- tops. Maybe three or four. I discussed this a little bit when talking about "getting the data out.": http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf/archives/000348.html
You might have found me through someone else's blogroll, or someone elses' link to an entry. But really, most anyone gets anywhere by searching for it. If you trust your search system, then you can find lots of good stuff. But intranets often have poorly-designed search tools, and so an intranet blog is likely to be kind of ignored, especially if there are other ways to get information about. The blogs at Google apparently are used as searchable repositories: engineers discuss problems they've run into, and then can use search to understand each others' problems.
I do the same thing and use Google to find entries on this blog.
What I'm thinking, I guess, is that there are a lot of ways to get data in to the net, both ones that exist and ones that don't yet. There are far fewer ways to get data out. In fact, I'm going to suggest that the answers are, basically:
1) RSS feeds (and reading the newest stuff)
2) Google
3) Everything else.
But wait! you say. What do you mean there are many ways to easily put data into the web? And why do you think there are so few to get it out?
Let's break this into two pieces. I'll take a look at a few paradigmatic easy publishing systems. I'd emphasise blogs, in which users individually write paragraph-plus posts, with comments; wikis, in which users (roughly anonymously) write anything from a single-character change to a new page; and del.icio.us and other link systems, in which users contribute a link, possibly with some annotation
| BLOG | WIKI | DELICIOUS | |
| Atom | Paragraph | text | link + annotation |
| Organization | temporal | arbitrary | temporal |
| Voice | One voice1 | Many authors | one author, but interlinks |
| Newest information | RSS | Recent Changes | RSS |
Now we can imagine a lot of possible ways of reshuffling this table. We could imagine, say, a Wiki-like tool where individuals wrote (blog-like) paragraphs at a time, for example, and oculd only shuffle around or move those units. Delicious' RSS feeds manage to act like link-oriented blogs, both individual and collective.
But I'm still only seeing a small number of ways to get infromation out. If you are reading something very nicely organized like Wikipedia (and alphabetical order really does make things easier), you can dig around in the obvious alphabetical way. If you are dealing with a less-well-organized system, you'll have a little more work:
I'm not trying to caricature here, although I realize that I'm oversimplifying a bit. The question I'm wrestling with is whether we can find a better way to find stuff that might be out there: there's a lot out there, and a great deal of it is desirable (at some point or another).
The answer to this is not particularly obvious to me.
September 13, 2004 08:19 PM | TrackBack | in FOOCamp